"Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum is a quarter of a century old today. The machine that really launched the UK IT industry hit the streets of a depressed Britain on 23 April, 1982. Dark days, then. But lo, along came bespectacled Messiah Sir Clive Sinclair with the successor to his 1981 release, the black-and-white ZX-81. The ZX Spectrum boasted a visual cortex-melting eight colours at 256 x 192 resolution, blistering 3.5MHz CPU, and crucially, a crisp-repelling vulcanised rubber keyboard."
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Member since:2006-01-24
yes, starting with Vic-20 and then upgrading to the C64 I remember scoffing at my friend and his small rubber thing that made ugly beeps. that was until he called me over to check out this new game called Knight Lore that he bought. that game started a long love for isometric games and although Ultimate never quite got it right again (imo) with Alien 8 coming closest, there were lots of others in the same genre that where great such as Head over Heels, Fairlight, Batman, Bobby Bearing, Quazatron etc.
here's my Speccy top 5:
1. Knight Lore
2. Thrust
3. Head over Heels
4. Fairlight
5. Underwurdle
ahh those were the days...
Member since:2005-07-11
Well I never thought we'd ever have a Speccy Top 5 on OSNews so I'm not about to let the opportunity go to waste! 
1. Lords of Midnight (still may favourite game to this day)
2. Knight Lore
3. Doomdark's Revenge
4. Elite (althought the BBC version was far better)
5. The Hobbit
The Spectrum was also the first computer I owned (my parents bought me the 16K model despite me hinting heavily that 48K would be so much more useful for school. They'd obviously rumbled my educational gambit straight away!). I had to use my saved up pocket money to buy an additional 32K - well over £100!
I still own 2 Spectrums (Original and Spectrum+), Interfaces 1 and Microdrive, 2 ZX81s bought at a computer fair years afterwards, and the superb QL which despite its many, many shortcomings, was still the most amazing computer to program on in those days.
As a developer by trade, I have Sir Clive to thank for getting me into computing in the first place. And the Spectrum to thank for wasting far too many hours trying to get to the last screen in Arcadia...
Member since:2006-08-31
"Yes, I still wonder how they did it. 48 kilobytes is nothing today, but they managed to create adventure games with lots of screens."
It was "An art", to program in those days with such memory constraints. Today, programmers BLOAT software!
I remember back circa 1982, I programmed a 32KB Atari 800 computer to emulate a Motorola paging generator (2 tone, 5 tone) and I also generated what was called GSC (Golay Sequential Code) binary format, and outputted the data through one I/O pin on one of the joystick ports
The data was fed to a signal generator, and was used for test purposes in the shop where I worked at, for several years.
The whole program was written in Atari BASIC (plus machine code routines for the GSC generation part), and it fitted in less than 16KB of RAM 
Those were the days!!!!
Member since:2006-11-08
Member since:2005-07-24
"""
Yes, I still wonder how they did it. 48 kilobytes is nothing today, but they managed to create adventure games with lots of screens.
"""
By that, do you mean graphical screens?
My idea of a really cool adventure game starts out something like:
---
You are standing beside a small brick building at the end of a road from the north. A river flows south. To the north is open country. And all around is dense forest.
What now?
---
Graphics are for ninnies. ;-)
Then again, I also enjoy the CBS Radio Mystery Theater...
Member since:2005-11-16
There were some great text adventures for the Spectrum. A few lines of well written prose could create a scene much more effectively than a screen full of blocky graphics. The Level 9 adventures were particular favourites of mine, some of the puzzles in games like Snowball and Return to Eden were pretty fiendish.
As tonywob pointed out, the average game back then tended to be a lot harder than the games around today. That's definitely true when comparing text adventures with modern graphical games. You didn't get the same handholding, with tutorials and hints to stop you getting stuck, and without the internet you couldn't just look up a walk-through. It certainly made completing those games a real challenge, and gave you a real sense of achievement if you actually did it. Of course trying to play text adventures on the Speccy's rubber keyboard was a challenge of its own...
Actually, there are still some great text adventures being written by the amateur community, using adventure programming languages like TADS and Inform. It's well worth having a look at the games around today, this archive is a good place to start: http://wurb.com/if/
Member since:2005-07-02
Member since:
2006-04-28
Yes, I still wonder how they did it. 48 kilobytes is nothing today, but they managed to create adventure games with lots of screens. My all time favorite was Knight Lore. I must have spent 200 hours playing that game
I can still remember the horrible noise it made when you loaded (load "") a game from a cassette tape, and it took like 5 minutes !
Oh, the good old times...